Non-invasive imaging technologies allow images of the internal structures of a patient or object to be obtained without performing an invasive procedure on the patient or object. In particular, technologies such as computed tomography (CT) use various physical principals, such as the differential transmission of x-rays through the target volume, to acquire image data and to construct tomographic images (e.g., three-dimensional representations of the interior of the human body or of other imaged structures).
For emergency room (ER) stroke management, time is critical to determine a proper course of treatment. For every minute a large vessel ischemic stroke is untreated, the average patient loses 1.9 million neurons. For each hour in which a treatment fails, the patient loses as many neurons as it does in almost 3.6 years of normal aging. Current standards of care require two contrast boli for separate CT angiography (CTA) and CT perfusion (CTP) studies. Further, prior to performing CTA and CTP studies, typical methods first perform a timing bolus scan, wherein a small contrast bolus is administered to a patient and subsequent contrast levels within the patient are monitored to generate a CTP/CTA scan plan personalized to the patient. However, the timing bolus scan alone takes five minutes, and performing CTA and CTP studies separately requires five to seven minutes between acquisitions to allow contrast washout.